Saturday, July 18, 2015

What The Sailors Said - TP52 World Championship - Final Day

“It has been a long time that we have been waiting for this moment. The last time we won a World Championship (as Matador) was here in Palma in 2009 so it was time for us to do it properly again. We were one point short two times so this time it feels really, really, sweet. We have had a wonderful week and I think as a team we have been working very good, not only the ones on the boat, the shore team, the sail makers and everyone contributes.

"I cannot describe how quickly these moments pass. So we feel really, really happy and we have to make sure we enjoy this moment because there are still two more regattas for the rest of the season that are going to be really, really tough so when you have a win like this you need to make sure you celebrate it properly.

"I think we stayed consistent for the week. I haven’t checked the results yet but our worst position was seventh on the first day and I think we were the only boat with single digits [all the way through]. Slowly but surely we were making a big advances on our competitors and we were trying to make sure we had a good average for every day and having an average of better than fourth for a regatta with 12 boats is obviously going to be a winning combination and for sure that made a difference.

"It was a good week in terms of confidence and the boat was going well, the crew did a fantastic job. We didn’t have any problem with any manoeuvre in the week so we had a very high standard.
I think that many times you do things how you always do and this week we had fifty good jibes and tacks and the whole crew did a fantastic job. It was the whole team working as a good package and I think that was the best combination of the fleet this week.

"We love it here, the boat stays here 100 metres away so we like this place, we always feel at home here, Valencia and here are the places where we feel the most comfortable and I think it shows on the water racing.

"It is a very good achievement beating second place by 14 points. This is the fourth regatta with this boat and the third we have won with this boat and I think that’s very good for the season so far. It’s a very, very, sweet moment but as I said before it is not always like this. We have a lot of very good sailors around us here and they will chase sometimes. So we need to make sure we stay as close as possible and make it last until the end of the season and I as I said we need to make sure we celebrate it properly today.

"We have been battling against Quantum Racing for a lot of years and we know that the only way to stay ahead of them is being perfect or very close to perfect so that is the only way it may look from outside that we have dominated but it was close.

"Today was a very demanding day, it was a light and steady breeze to come from the start of the third one with a black flag. The tension was very high but we were able to execute our plan to start to the right of them and control them from the right. We expected the right to be strong but we ended up going left with them, but we made sure we were always to the right of them so we were able to control them and it worked but as I said we need to keep pushing and making sure.”

"We tried to win races. That was the difference for us. That worked out a few times and we didn’t look at the scoreboard, we tried to focus on the boat speed and boat handling all the time in every single race and we are concentrating on every single race not on the whole event.
Before the last race we said “okay what are we going to do?” and we tried to win the race and we did so that’s it.

"Our team is tremendous, a really good team. I started with this team this Spring and I did so many things different than the last TP52 campaign. We have a few different guys on the boat and I am steering the boat myself. I kept it like this and friendship with great professionals combine into a good team.”